Be Safe I Love You

Even before she decides to go to Iraq Lauren Clay is fighting a war. A war created by two parents who, for different reasons, are unable to care for her and her nine-year-old brother, Daniel. Instead, Lauren is left, at age 14 to take care of herself, her brother and her father, who lies in bed and cries. Despite having a prodigious talent as a coloratura soprano and having been accepted at a major music school, when the foreclosure notices arrive on their house, Lauren gives up her hopes for her future and signs up for the Marines. Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman begins when Lauren returns after her tour of duty and finds a world that is both familiar and unknown.

Hoffman does an admirable job at portraying the almost impossible transition from solider to civilian. As Lauren struggles to adapt back into her previous life there are simply too many elements that no longer add up—her father is working now and taking care of her brother, Daniel has become a normal teen attached to his phone and PC, and Shane, the love of her life, is a college student and moving in a world as foreign to her as Iraq once was. How she reconciles these changes and where she sees her place in her old world are the crux of Be Safe I Love You. If underneath the sameness of everyday life there is a much larger trauma that colors her perceptions, Lauren is determined not to show it and, indeed, she doesn’t seem to know it herself. At best,

…she now knew the difference between never and always was small. Never and always are separated by a wasp’s waist, a small sliver of glass, one bead of sweat; separated by the seven seconds it takes to exhale the air from your lungs, to make your body as still as the corpse you are about to create.

It is not just Lauren’s point-of-view we see but also those of her friends and the people around her in the small military town of Watertown, New York. For her boyfriend, Shane, who is home on school break, there is the confusion of the Lauren he knew and this lean, commanding presence who feels like a stranger. He also struggles to re-acclimate to his small town life and the fact that his mother continues to take care of his uncles—all grown men physically but all unwilling to grow up.

Patrick was so ignorant he didn’t even understand the fundamentals of his own poverty, had created a mystique and heroism around it, made it about being looked down upon by professors who were suddenly shocked to learn of his genius, exploited by some phantom elite, even as he was paying the Guinness and Marlboro empires for his own death on credit.

For Lauren, it is only as events and people do not respond as she expects, even demands, that her tightly wound core begins to unravel. Still, she must be in control and even as she realizes that

The woman she was supposed to be, was meant to be, would have been, could never exist at all now, and she was stuck dragging around this ruined version of herself.

she thinks it means only that she must continue to give up her life for all the lives around her. On the one hand, she wants nothing more than to go back to the past but she also longs for a future she has constructed in her own mind.

While Lauren is the main story, Hoffman also illuminates the role of women in all spheres as both the strength and the nurturing side of life. The men are not evil but it is the women getting things done, carrying the weight, and acknowledging the realities of life. This provides an interesting point-of-view to a novel about a subject largely considered to be the purview of men. Ultimately, Be Safe I Love You neutralizes the question of gender when it comes to warfare. The powerful and timely issues being asked in the novel are: what are we doing to young people when sending them far away to fight in shifting, unending conflicts? And how are we prepared to help them when/if they make it back? For Lauren, there are no easy answers and she’s left to find her own way home.